System and ai (sai) lab

Introduction

The Systems and Artificial Intelligence (SAI) Lab builds efficient AI systems and architectures for next-generation computing platforms. We focus on hardware/software co-design, AI acceleration, model optimization, and spatial computing, with the goal of enabling scalable, efficient, and human-centered intelligence on AR/VR, wearable, and edge devices.

If you are interested in working with us, please send your CV to sailabapplication@gmail.com.

Ph.D. Students

Tianhua Xia received his B.S. in Electrical Engineering from Beijing Institute of Technology and his M.Eng. in Electrical and Computer Engineering from UIUC. Since August 2024, he has been pursuing his Ph.D. in Electrical and Computer Engineering at NYU. Before joining NYU, he worked as an ASIC Design Engineer at Qualcomm, focusing on low-power SoC hardware and algorithm design. His research focuses on efficient AI through algorithm and hardware-system co-optimization, as well as efficient computing systems for AR/VR. Tianhua has received several awards recognizing his research achievements, including the 2026 ECE Dante Youla Award for Graduate Research Excellence, the 2026 Dr. Li Annual ECE Publication Award, and the 2025 DAC Young Fellow Award. Outside of work, he enjoys playing basketball and watching movies.

Haiyu Wang has been a Ph.D. student in Electrical and Computer Engineering at New York University since August 2024.  He received his B.S. from Peking University. His research interests include machine learning, efficient AI/ML systems, computer architecture, hardware–software co-design, and virtual and augmented reality (VR/AR). Haiyu has received several awards given his great research achievement, including the 2026 ECE Dante Youla Award for Graduate Research Excellence, the 2026 Dr. Li Annual ECE Publication Award.

Leshu Li is a first-year PhD student of Computer Science.  His research interest focuses on hardware–software co-design and efficient AI. Outside the lab, I enjoy playing tennis, listening to R&B music, and watching movies. I am especially interested in character-driven films and am a big fan of Martin Scorsese.

Luka Govedič is a first-year PhD student, interested in advancing programming language (PL) & compiler technologies to improve performance in machine learning training and inference, as well as scientific computing. Originally from Slovenia, he got his Bachelor's and Master's of Engineering at MIT. After that, he spent 3 years in industry working on LLM inference performance at Neural Magic & Red Hat.

Henry Kam is a first-year PhD student at New York University, co-advised by Prof. Qi Sun and Prof. Sai Qian Zhang. My research focuses on leveraging human visual perception to optimize generative models and VR/AR systems, alongside designing efficient AI for resource-constrained environments.

Master's Students

  • Xiangyang (Shawn) Yin

    • Research area: Efficient AI algorithms, AI system

    • Award: Suzanne McIntosh Fellowship for Best M.S. Research

    • Publication: ICLR 2026, ICML 2026

  • Jishnu Warrier

    • Research area: Foundation models for power distribution networks

    • Publication: EACL 2026

  • Yutong Wang
    • Research area: Efficient AI algorithms, AI system

    • Publication: NeurIPS 2025, ICLR 2026

  • Xingyu Liu
    • Research area: Efficient AI algorithms

    • Award: NYU Theodor Tamir Award for Best M.S. Research

    • Publication: NeurIPS 202, ICLR 2026

  • Jiajing Zheng
    • Research area: AR/VR Privacy, Foundation models for Biology
    • Publication: ASPLOS'26, Visarch workshop
  • Yifei Feng
    • Research area: AI system, speculative decoding

  • Satyapragnya Kar

    • Research area: Foundation models for power distribution networks

  • Yin Wang
    • Research area: Foundation model application, efficient AI
  • Yifan Hu
    • Research area: AR/VR application, efficient AI
  • Shubham Ojha

    • Research area: AR/VR application, efficient AI

  • Haoyang Ma
    • Research area: AR/VR application, long-video understanding

Undergrads/K-12 Students

  • Jack Jiang

    • Research area: Efficient AI algorithms

    • Publications: ICLR'26

  • Mugilan Ganesan

    • Research area: AI acceleration, speculative decoding

  • Shengyang Tao

    • Research area: Foundation models for biology

  • Zach Lilien (Packer Collegiate Institute)
    • Research area: AR/VR applications
  • Vinisha Singireddy 
  • Asha Archer

Intern Students

  • Xuerong Liu

    • Research area: Efficient AR Application 

  • Zhiheng Dai

    • Research area: AR/VR hardware

Alumni

  • Yixuan Luo
  • Chao Gao
  • Jingyang Xiang
  • Jiajun Qin
  • Zhenyuan Dong
  • Khushi Sharma
  • Mingzhi Zhu
  • Hongyi Zeng
  • Rahul Raman
  • Shuo Xin
  • Kedong Xiu
  • Fengze Yu
  • Qiance Tang
  • Ziqi Wang
  • Su Chen
  • Xingyu Liu
  • Yunhai Hu
  • Zining Liu
  • Yanzhou Tang